A lot of "social housing" in the UK was perfectly decent and still exists - I grew up in a council house as did a lot of my friends. The main thing that has changed is that most of those houses have now been bought and are privately owned.

Yes, of course there were a lot of grim council housing estates (particularly tower blocks) that had to be knocked down but the causes were often a lot more complex than the concept of social housing being fundamentally flawed.